Subject
THOUGHTS: Proof beyond ultimate proof--I mean,
plausibility argument (long)
plausibility argument (long)
From
Date
Body
Jerry Friedman responds.
--- On Sun, 4/5/09, Stan Kelly-Bootle <skb@BOOTLE.BIZ> wrote:
...
> Serious provers and
> proof-checkers would shun phrases like ³proof beyond
> ultimate proof,²
> although one hears such claims in the amateur, popular
> literature.
You can infer from this that when I compared myself to an
unfortunate apophenic and probably schizophrenic, I wasn't
serious, or that my post was part of the amateur, popular
literature. That wasn't an exclusive "or".
[skipping mathematical points that I know already]
> Allowing for the obvious fact that the so-called Pale Fire
> Puzzle is not a
> mathematical problem, we are still entitled to a clear
> statement (or list of
> statements) before a Q.E.D. Is flourished as to ³what has
> been demonstrated.²
Fortunately, it hasn't been flourished.
> Here are some possibilities associated with
> your previous
> postings (not that I can claim to have read or understood
> them all;
> apologies offered and corrections expected.)
Okay.
> 1. Pale Fire covers many topics but ³death/mortality,²
> ³other worlds,² ³the
> after-world,² and ³diverse modes of survival² play a
> major role.
> [Hard to deny]
Check.
> 2. Some of VN¹s characters claim a belief in, and
> ³reported events²
> indicate, some form of ³physical life after death.²
> [Reasonable statement]
Check.
> 3. ONE purpose of Pale Fire is to prove some form of
> ³physical life after
> death,² and, taken together with VN¹s other works, that
> we attach some
> factual, evidential support from (2).
If you mean "prove that any kind of life after death exists
in our world", I certainly don't think /Pale Fire/ or any
fiction could be taken as having that purpose. If you mean
"prove that it exists in the fiction", I don't see the
difference from (2).
> Also that VN himself generally shares the beliefs of (2)
> [Here, some doubts start a-peeping with regards to
> Œcharacter honesty.¹
> Which parts of PF are Œtrue-fiction¹ and which
> Œfalse-fiction?¹
I'll get to that doubt and that question. But I don't
feel they're relevant to VN's belief. I've mentioned
evidence that he believed it at some times both before
and after he wrote PF. Maybe those who have read more of
his work than I have or remember or understand it better
can provide evidence that he didn't believe it at other
times.
> World
> fiction has many credible accounts of seances and other
> evidence of ghostly survivals.
How can fiction have a credible account?
> Dante, Ulysses and Ezekiel wouldn¹t lie! But,
> non-fictional
> reports of Œlife after death¹ have, so far, failed to
> meet ŒHumean¹
> standards of Œevidence.¹ Statement 3 remains plausible,
> subject to one¹s
> definition of Œliterary-truth² and ³proof.¹ The big
> advantage of (3) is that
> it doesn¹t necessarily contradict the many other readings
> of PF,
Quite true, though I may contradict some later on.
> apart
> perhaps for the widely-held feeling that Nabokov¹s novels
> have no such didactic intent!
I don't feel this novel has /didactic/ intent. It provides
a picture of a possibility.
However, allow me to reminisce about a course for high
school students in the rudiments of number theory that I
took. The professor--can I really have forgotten his
name?--told us that if a statement began "Consider",
it was the most important part of a proof.
> 4. THE sole purpose of Pale Fire is as in (3) and that sole
> purpose is
> clearly indicated by VN¹s text (and other extra-textual
> clues). Furthermore,
> that purpose has been achieved. Careful readers can be
> defined as those convinced by Pale Fire that
[..."(4) is correct"? Something seems to be missing.]
I imagine this is your rephrasing of my statement that
/Pale Fire/ is "a riddle with an elegant solution". If
Nabokov could refer to his books that way (SO, p. 16),
then I think I can. I also don't need to remind you of
his description of a chess problem as having a solution
(bishop to c2) but as taking the reader on a journey
comparable to "Albany to New York by way of Vancouver,
Eurasia, and the Azores". In other words, I didn't say
"/only/" a riddle. While we're at it, I didn't mention
"careful readers" at all.
> [I don¹t believe that Statement 4 has been
> proved yet. I can envisage variations of 4 that increase
> its plausibility.
> but it seems unconvincing that such a complex, multilayered
> novel should be
> reduced to a re-statement of VN¹s putative views on time,
> survival, memory,
> resurrection, transcendence (and other hand-waving terms
> ;=))
Okay, here's my variation of that statement. Nabokov
intended /Pale Fire/ to raise the possibility of a
world "above" ours, related to ours in a way somewhat
analogous to the way he was related to his creation.
That is a sufficiently important part of the book that
readers who realize it may feel that, though they are
careful enough to have visited Vancouver, Eurasia, and the
Azores, they have finally reached New York.
As I'm talking about intentions, I intend to use
Nabokov's statements as evidence for them.
Starting with statements (1) and (2) above, I'll add my
(3), which I think is incontrovertible: The speculations
at the end of Canto Three are largely true. There is
someone, namely Nabokov, enjoying the games he plays
with Shade and the clues, quibbles, and correspondences
he places in it. (However, Shade imagines "players",
whereas there's only one player, unless either his wife
or other readers count.)
As a line in the book says, such a higher power seems
to be a necessary condition for life after death, and
is certainly a sufficient condition (n. 549).
Another point: as Alexandrov said about all of Nabokov's
novels, the book is full of evidence of "madeness". I'll
just cite the carefully planned Goldsworth and Wordsmith.
Now I'd like to look at two cases: Some readers rely on
some events Kinbote narrates can be fictionally "real",
and some do not.
In the first case, if we accept Nabokov's own comments
and his wife's, then one of the least doubtful points in
the book is that the letter sequence from the will-o-the-
wisp is an attempt at a warning (Vladimir) from Aunt Maud
(Vera, confirming the implication of the aphasia). Then
we should also accept that the supernatural, in particular
life after death, exists in the fictional world of the
book. Thus Shade's speculations at the end of Canto Four
are also true, with the exception of one of his
"commonsense" predictions. We can add as many ghosts
and reincarnations in the book as we find reason to
believe.
I'll turn to the second case: Nothing in Kinbote's
apparatus is reliable or maybe even plausible. That's
what I believe, though I'm not going to present the
evidence in this long post. If I understand Matt Roth,
Jansy Mello, and Joseph Aisenberg correctly, that's what
they believe too, though otherwise they may disagree
strongly with me.
Then what do we have? Maybe still the poem (as the MPD
theorists found an ingenious way to maintain), but in the
great majority of the book, we have nothing we can hang
onto except those links and bobolinks--in short, the
madeness.
Furthermore, the clues that led me and Joseph Aisenberg
to doubt Kinbote are analogous to the surrealities
of /Invitation to a Beheading/--where the unreality of
the fictional setting leads to its dissolution and
Cincinnatus's afterlife in a more real world. Only in
/Pale Fire/ we have the more satisfying job of rolling
up the scenery ourselves.
So we have an argument based on coincidences and patterns
leading to the correct conclusion that there's an otherworld
"above" the book. We have a good deal more "madeness"
focusing our attention on the author. We have a connection
in either case between an otherworld and survival. And we
have Nabokov's belief in an otherworld above ours, as
glimpsed in coincidences and patterns that imply our
world's "madeness" (which you've granted he believed,
though Jansy has just said she wouldn't). (In fact, there
are a few real coincidences mentioned in the book, such as
crown-crow-cow and korona-korova-vorona (n. 803) and maybe
Sutcliff and Clifton combining to make Sutton. But a
real amassing of coincidences wouldn't work in a novel;
we may have to come up with them from our own life or
from Nabokov's as he retold it.) So I think--there will
be no Q.E.D.--that the next step is meant to be obvious:
consideration of the possibility of a world above ours,
playing games with us, and that consequently we have
hope of a life after death.
As I mentioned, this view gains plausibility because of
the titles. Shade's "Pale Fire" is a reflection of or
transparent window to Nabokov in our world, his
empyrean, as Nabokov's /Pale Fire/ is to Someone in our
empyrean.
Another corroboration (which must be in Boyd, but it's
too late at night for me to search) is that Shade's
1000th line is now solved. He now is the shadow of
the waxwing (/Bombycilla shadei/) slain, which lives on
in the reflected sky. (Or he's the part that lives on,
the shade, if you think isn't the shadow.) As Kinbote
says of the repeated line at the end of "Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening", the lines are identical,
but the one at the end is "metaphysical and universal."
But Shade couldn't "settle" this while he was alive.
Only after his death do we get the job of filling in
the blank and understanding it. This may be the
solution mentioned in the letter you quoted about
Nabokov's ideas that developed into /Pale Fire/.
I promised no Q.E.D. One of my college roommates, who
liked certain French movies, used to end his notes with
a cartoon of the visible part of a shark and the word
FIN.
> One character that needs more attention is the Gardner,
("Gardener", not that it matters.)
> the last person
> named in Shade¹s final lines. I identify him with Gerald
> Gardner, the
> founder of the modern ³Wicca² (or ³Wica²) pagan
> pantheist, Witchcraft
> movement (1954). Its pentagram logo would satisfy the
> wildest Nabokovian
> demand for symmetry (mirror-folding and rotational). Also,
> most Wiccans
> believe in various forms of life-after-death and are active
> in spirit
> communications. Hazel¹s Old Barn experience would not
> surprise my Gardner.
> This link supports theory (3) above.
...
It also supports what I'm saying, which I appreciate, but
I'd need some other connection--and as you might note
yourself, occurrences of the word "which" don't count!
If the gardener's profession needs an explanation, it's
one where Kinbote can see him with his shirt off and that
Kinbote can hire him for. (He doesn't need a lifeguard,
for example.) On the other hand, I don't suppose even a
white jacket would interfere with Kinbote's getting
interested in a waiter and hiring him as a butler and
cook, say.
I still think the gardener is Balthazar, Pope Pius is
Melchior--and the missing Casper is the Friendly Ghost.
Whichever ghost you like. Not that that rules out
other connections.
> PS: In Kinbote¹s farewell at end of his final meandering
> commentary, ³ ... I
> may ... cook up a stage play, an old fashioned melodrama
> with three principles: ³
>
> But he then lists three principals: the lunatic assassin,
> the lunatic king,
> and ³a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into
> the line of fire,
> and perishes in the clash between the two figments.²
>
> Is this a typo in my Penguin Classics Pale Fire, reprinted
> 2000?
...
It's "principles" in my Vintage copy too. Beyond that I
don't have any guesses.
> Kinbote also uses ³confusely² (p 149) ³ ... but [Shade]
> also made me regret
> that I prevented him from getting to the point he was
> confusely and
> self-consciously making (for as I have said in an earlier
> note, he never cared to refer to his dead child) ...²
> ³Confusely² lies uneasily between the usual dictionary
> options: ³confusedly² and ³confusingly.² Any ideas?
The New Shorter OED dates "confusely" to "Late Middle
English to Mid 18th Century" and relates it to the
obsolete adjective "confuse" meaning "confused", not
"confusing". I see it as a gallicism, "confusément".
Kinbote may have disliked the adjectival "confused" for
the same reason I dislike "clichéed"--"confus(e)" and
"cliché" are already past participles that function as
adjectives, so you don't need to add -ed. But I say
"confusedly" (and "sauteed").
Also, of course, Kinbote will do anything to call
attention to his writing.
> And surely Kinbote is the confused one, since by the time
> he wrote this
> note, Shade had referred to Hazel often in the Cantos.
...
I take him to mean that Shade at the barn was talking about
Hazel in a confused way.
I hope that's enough.
Jerry Friedman
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
--- On Sun, 4/5/09, Stan Kelly-Bootle <skb@BOOTLE.BIZ> wrote:
...
> Serious provers and
> proof-checkers would shun phrases like ³proof beyond
> ultimate proof,²
> although one hears such claims in the amateur, popular
> literature.
You can infer from this that when I compared myself to an
unfortunate apophenic and probably schizophrenic, I wasn't
serious, or that my post was part of the amateur, popular
literature. That wasn't an exclusive "or".
[skipping mathematical points that I know already]
> Allowing for the obvious fact that the so-called Pale Fire
> Puzzle is not a
> mathematical problem, we are still entitled to a clear
> statement (or list of
> statements) before a Q.E.D. Is flourished as to ³what has
> been demonstrated.²
Fortunately, it hasn't been flourished.
> Here are some possibilities associated with
> your previous
> postings (not that I can claim to have read or understood
> them all;
> apologies offered and corrections expected.)
Okay.
> 1. Pale Fire covers many topics but ³death/mortality,²
> ³other worlds,² ³the
> after-world,² and ³diverse modes of survival² play a
> major role.
> [Hard to deny]
Check.
> 2. Some of VN¹s characters claim a belief in, and
> ³reported events²
> indicate, some form of ³physical life after death.²
> [Reasonable statement]
Check.
> 3. ONE purpose of Pale Fire is to prove some form of
> ³physical life after
> death,² and, taken together with VN¹s other works, that
> we attach some
> factual, evidential support from (2).
If you mean "prove that any kind of life after death exists
in our world", I certainly don't think /Pale Fire/ or any
fiction could be taken as having that purpose. If you mean
"prove that it exists in the fiction", I don't see the
difference from (2).
> Also that VN himself generally shares the beliefs of (2)
> [Here, some doubts start a-peeping with regards to
> Œcharacter honesty.¹
> Which parts of PF are Œtrue-fiction¹ and which
> Œfalse-fiction?¹
I'll get to that doubt and that question. But I don't
feel they're relevant to VN's belief. I've mentioned
evidence that he believed it at some times both before
and after he wrote PF. Maybe those who have read more of
his work than I have or remember or understand it better
can provide evidence that he didn't believe it at other
times.
> World
> fiction has many credible accounts of seances and other
> evidence of ghostly survivals.
How can fiction have a credible account?
> Dante, Ulysses and Ezekiel wouldn¹t lie! But,
> non-fictional
> reports of Œlife after death¹ have, so far, failed to
> meet ŒHumean¹
> standards of Œevidence.¹ Statement 3 remains plausible,
> subject to one¹s
> definition of Œliterary-truth² and ³proof.¹ The big
> advantage of (3) is that
> it doesn¹t necessarily contradict the many other readings
> of PF,
Quite true, though I may contradict some later on.
> apart
> perhaps for the widely-held feeling that Nabokov¹s novels
> have no such didactic intent!
I don't feel this novel has /didactic/ intent. It provides
a picture of a possibility.
However, allow me to reminisce about a course for high
school students in the rudiments of number theory that I
took. The professor--can I really have forgotten his
name?--told us that if a statement began "Consider",
it was the most important part of a proof.
> 4. THE sole purpose of Pale Fire is as in (3) and that sole
> purpose is
> clearly indicated by VN¹s text (and other extra-textual
> clues). Furthermore,
> that purpose has been achieved. Careful readers can be
> defined as those convinced by Pale Fire that
[..."(4) is correct"? Something seems to be missing.]
I imagine this is your rephrasing of my statement that
/Pale Fire/ is "a riddle with an elegant solution". If
Nabokov could refer to his books that way (SO, p. 16),
then I think I can. I also don't need to remind you of
his description of a chess problem as having a solution
(bishop to c2) but as taking the reader on a journey
comparable to "Albany to New York by way of Vancouver,
Eurasia, and the Azores". In other words, I didn't say
"/only/" a riddle. While we're at it, I didn't mention
"careful readers" at all.
> [I don¹t believe that Statement 4 has been
> proved yet. I can envisage variations of 4 that increase
> its plausibility.
> but it seems unconvincing that such a complex, multilayered
> novel should be
> reduced to a re-statement of VN¹s putative views on time,
> survival, memory,
> resurrection, transcendence (and other hand-waving terms
> ;=))
Okay, here's my variation of that statement. Nabokov
intended /Pale Fire/ to raise the possibility of a
world "above" ours, related to ours in a way somewhat
analogous to the way he was related to his creation.
That is a sufficiently important part of the book that
readers who realize it may feel that, though they are
careful enough to have visited Vancouver, Eurasia, and the
Azores, they have finally reached New York.
As I'm talking about intentions, I intend to use
Nabokov's statements as evidence for them.
Starting with statements (1) and (2) above, I'll add my
(3), which I think is incontrovertible: The speculations
at the end of Canto Three are largely true. There is
someone, namely Nabokov, enjoying the games he plays
with Shade and the clues, quibbles, and correspondences
he places in it. (However, Shade imagines "players",
whereas there's only one player, unless either his wife
or other readers count.)
As a line in the book says, such a higher power seems
to be a necessary condition for life after death, and
is certainly a sufficient condition (n. 549).
Another point: as Alexandrov said about all of Nabokov's
novels, the book is full of evidence of "madeness". I'll
just cite the carefully planned Goldsworth and Wordsmith.
Now I'd like to look at two cases: Some readers rely on
some events Kinbote narrates can be fictionally "real",
and some do not.
In the first case, if we accept Nabokov's own comments
and his wife's, then one of the least doubtful points in
the book is that the letter sequence from the will-o-the-
wisp is an attempt at a warning (Vladimir) from Aunt Maud
(Vera, confirming the implication of the aphasia). Then
we should also accept that the supernatural, in particular
life after death, exists in the fictional world of the
book. Thus Shade's speculations at the end of Canto Four
are also true, with the exception of one of his
"commonsense" predictions. We can add as many ghosts
and reincarnations in the book as we find reason to
believe.
I'll turn to the second case: Nothing in Kinbote's
apparatus is reliable or maybe even plausible. That's
what I believe, though I'm not going to present the
evidence in this long post. If I understand Matt Roth,
Jansy Mello, and Joseph Aisenberg correctly, that's what
they believe too, though otherwise they may disagree
strongly with me.
Then what do we have? Maybe still the poem (as the MPD
theorists found an ingenious way to maintain), but in the
great majority of the book, we have nothing we can hang
onto except those links and bobolinks--in short, the
madeness.
Furthermore, the clues that led me and Joseph Aisenberg
to doubt Kinbote are analogous to the surrealities
of /Invitation to a Beheading/--where the unreality of
the fictional setting leads to its dissolution and
Cincinnatus's afterlife in a more real world. Only in
/Pale Fire/ we have the more satisfying job of rolling
up the scenery ourselves.
So we have an argument based on coincidences and patterns
leading to the correct conclusion that there's an otherworld
"above" the book. We have a good deal more "madeness"
focusing our attention on the author. We have a connection
in either case between an otherworld and survival. And we
have Nabokov's belief in an otherworld above ours, as
glimpsed in coincidences and patterns that imply our
world's "madeness" (which you've granted he believed,
though Jansy has just said she wouldn't). (In fact, there
are a few real coincidences mentioned in the book, such as
crown-crow-cow and korona-korova-vorona (n. 803) and maybe
Sutcliff and Clifton combining to make Sutton. But a
real amassing of coincidences wouldn't work in a novel;
we may have to come up with them from our own life or
from Nabokov's as he retold it.) So I think--there will
be no Q.E.D.--that the next step is meant to be obvious:
consideration of the possibility of a world above ours,
playing games with us, and that consequently we have
hope of a life after death.
As I mentioned, this view gains plausibility because of
the titles. Shade's "Pale Fire" is a reflection of or
transparent window to Nabokov in our world, his
empyrean, as Nabokov's /Pale Fire/ is to Someone in our
empyrean.
Another corroboration (which must be in Boyd, but it's
too late at night for me to search) is that Shade's
1000th line is now solved. He now is the shadow of
the waxwing (/Bombycilla shadei/) slain, which lives on
in the reflected sky. (Or he's the part that lives on,
the shade, if you think isn't the shadow.) As Kinbote
says of the repeated line at the end of "Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening", the lines are identical,
but the one at the end is "metaphysical and universal."
But Shade couldn't "settle" this while he was alive.
Only after his death do we get the job of filling in
the blank and understanding it. This may be the
solution mentioned in the letter you quoted about
Nabokov's ideas that developed into /Pale Fire/.
I promised no Q.E.D. One of my college roommates, who
liked certain French movies, used to end his notes with
a cartoon of the visible part of a shark and the word
FIN.
> One character that needs more attention is the Gardner,
("Gardener", not that it matters.)
> the last person
> named in Shade¹s final lines. I identify him with Gerald
> Gardner, the
> founder of the modern ³Wicca² (or ³Wica²) pagan
> pantheist, Witchcraft
> movement (1954). Its pentagram logo would satisfy the
> wildest Nabokovian
> demand for symmetry (mirror-folding and rotational). Also,
> most Wiccans
> believe in various forms of life-after-death and are active
> in spirit
> communications. Hazel¹s Old Barn experience would not
> surprise my Gardner.
> This link supports theory (3) above.
...
It also supports what I'm saying, which I appreciate, but
I'd need some other connection--and as you might note
yourself, occurrences of the word "which" don't count!
If the gardener's profession needs an explanation, it's
one where Kinbote can see him with his shirt off and that
Kinbote can hire him for. (He doesn't need a lifeguard,
for example.) On the other hand, I don't suppose even a
white jacket would interfere with Kinbote's getting
interested in a waiter and hiring him as a butler and
cook, say.
I still think the gardener is Balthazar, Pope Pius is
Melchior--and the missing Casper is the Friendly Ghost.
Whichever ghost you like. Not that that rules out
other connections.
> PS: In Kinbote¹s farewell at end of his final meandering
> commentary, ³ ... I
> may ... cook up a stage play, an old fashioned melodrama
> with three principles: ³
>
> But he then lists three principals: the lunatic assassin,
> the lunatic king,
> and ³a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into
> the line of fire,
> and perishes in the clash between the two figments.²
>
> Is this a typo in my Penguin Classics Pale Fire, reprinted
> 2000?
...
It's "principles" in my Vintage copy too. Beyond that I
don't have any guesses.
> Kinbote also uses ³confusely² (p 149) ³ ... but [Shade]
> also made me regret
> that I prevented him from getting to the point he was
> confusely and
> self-consciously making (for as I have said in an earlier
> note, he never cared to refer to his dead child) ...²
> ³Confusely² lies uneasily between the usual dictionary
> options: ³confusedly² and ³confusingly.² Any ideas?
The New Shorter OED dates "confusely" to "Late Middle
English to Mid 18th Century" and relates it to the
obsolete adjective "confuse" meaning "confused", not
"confusing". I see it as a gallicism, "confusément".
Kinbote may have disliked the adjectival "confused" for
the same reason I dislike "clichéed"--"confus(e)" and
"cliché" are already past participles that function as
adjectives, so you don't need to add -ed. But I say
"confusedly" (and "sauteed").
Also, of course, Kinbote will do anything to call
attention to his writing.
> And surely Kinbote is the confused one, since by the time
> he wrote this
> note, Shade had referred to Hazel often in the Cantos.
...
I take him to mean that Shade at the barn was talking about
Hazel in a confused way.
I hope that's enough.
Jerry Friedman
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/